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UK IT directors ignoring compliance

Disaster recovery and business continuity considered far more important

Compliance barely registers as an issue for the majority of UK IT directors,
according to a survey by
BridgeHead
Software.

Despite the widespread coverage of
Sarbanes-Oxley and
Basel II in
vendor literature and the media, respondents said that disaster recovery,
business continuity, growing data volumes, the
Data
Protection Act and the
Freedom
of Information Act are the major drivers in their data strategies. Only six
per cent mentioned US-initiated legislation such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Disaster recovery and business continuity were cited by 48 per cent as the
key drivers behind the need for archiving.

The second most frequently declared factor was the sheer volume of data
growth, at 27 per cent of those surveyed. Corporate governance and compliance
were cited as drivers by 22 per cent of respondents.

When asked which aspects of compliance regulation were having an impact on
business, 48 per cent did not identify regulatory compliance as a factor at all.

The key regulations affecting business in the UK remain the Data Protection
Act (27 per cent) and the Freedom of Information Act (12 per cent). Only six per
cent mentioned Sarbanes-Oxley.

Despite acknowledging the importance of archiving for backup and disaster
recovery, only 15 per cent of respondents were unable to say how long it would
take to retrieve a lost file, and two per cent admitted that they probably would
not be able to retrieve it at all.

Some 32 per cent of those who could actually find a lost file would need
between an hour and a day to track it down, and six per cent would need more
than a day.

Tony Cotterill, chief executive at BridgeHead Software, said: "This is a bit
of a wake-up call for the storage industry.

"It seems IT directors know that US compliance regulations affect relatively
few of them, and perhaps they realise that compliance is largely achievable as a
by-product of good day-to-day data housekeeping.

"If it takes over an hour to retrieve a file, the user will have already
started to recreate it or survive without it with all the waste that that
entails."